I'm pleased at the turnout. Reliable metrics for readership of blogs are hard to come by. Bloggers' own statistics tell me that the page where the question is posed (Do You Have Access to JSTOR?) has been viewed 499 times. But the form for the poll appeared only in the sidebar of the blog home page, so the mediation of the question page to answer is not required. Feedburner tells me that there are something more than three thousand subscribers to the news feed. My impression is that most of those receiving the feed via a feed reader or email don't click thru to the blog home page, even if they do click through to the resources discussed in an entry, so they don't see the form in the sidebar without taking action. In any case, 567 is a pretty good sample of readership.

Slightly more than half of the respondents have access to JSTOR. Slightly less than half do not. It seems possible to me that those without access are more likely to respond that those with access, but I see no way to test this issue. Nevertheless, it is clear that those without access represent an important component of the readership of AWOL. I imagine this group spans a range of types of person, including unaffiliated academics, academics associated with institutions that do not or can not subscribe to JSTOR, to lay persons interested in the study of antiquity, and other categories. It also seems evident that these persons are serious enough about the study of antiquity to read/subscribe to AWOL.

What can be done to serve you better? One thing seems obvious. JSTOR is piloting a program under which institutions can offer ongoing access to JSTOR to their alumni. At present this program is available to graduates of the following institutions:

If you are an alum of one of these institutions and do not have access to JSTOR at the moment, contact your alumni association. If you do not see the name of you institution on the list, please contact your alumni association, send them the link to this page, and ask them to participate.

If you are a Massachusetts State Resident, you can sign up for a Boston Public Library eCard via the web. Just follow the prompts on the registration form and your eCard number will be emailed to you.

Do you know of other states offering this service? Please let me know.

E. Veryard, An account of divers choice remarks, as well geographical as
historical, political, mathematical, physical and moral, taken in a
journey through the Low-Countries, France, Italy and part of Spain; with
the isles of Sicily and Malta. As also a Voyage to the Levant: a
description of Candia, Egypt, S. Smith and B. Walford, London 1701 http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k350134.r=egypt.langEN

G. Belzoni, Narrative of the operations and recent discoveries within
the pyramids, temples, tombs and excavations in Egypt and Nubia, and of a
journey to the coast of the Red Sea, in search of the ancient Berenice
and another to the oasis of Jupiter Ammon, J. Murray, London 1820 http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1053464.r=egypt.langEN

The authors present 3d reconstructions of the painted tombs of Cimmerian Bosporus, state, whichexisted in the North Black Sea area in VI century B.C. - V century A.D. Crypts, was found andinvestigated by Russian historians in second half of XIX - beginning of XX centuries.Reconstructions are executed on the basis the archive materials, which are stored in the Instituteof Material Culture of Russian Academy of Sciences in St.-Petersburg. Crypts were lost because ofpolitical events at the beginning of XX century. Of special interest among available material, onbasis of which was conducted computer reconstruction, are the aquarelles and gouaches ofRussian artists XIX - XX of centuries The computer reconstructions of crypts are executed with theaid of the application 3Ds Max.

With the visual materials of Cimmerian Bosporus Painted Crypts project it is possible to becomeacquainted on project’s site http://www.bosporuscrypt.ru/ (in Russian) and on the sitehttp://www.3DMultimediaLab.com

Friday, October 28, 2011

The Scientific & Educational Centre
for Classical Studies at Yaroslavl State University (Russia) resumes
acceptance of papers for the web-conference «Ancient Civilization: Political Institutions and Legal Regulation»
which is currently conducted on the Centre’s website. The format of the
event is a forum-like discussion of presented papers. All professors,
PhD students and qualified scholars in Classical Studies are invited to
participate.

Taking into consideration results of the
conference “first phase”, we would like to emphasize, that a
participant, whose paper has been accepted, must sign up on the website. We strongly recommend that all presenters check from time to time the page with their work and answer the comments. It is also supposed that those, whose papers are posted, will participate in discussion of other papers. (All comments, written in Russian, we will translate into English.)

Papers (in English) are to be submitted by the 31st of March 2012 and will be posted right after their acceptance.

Length of a paper: up to 20,000 characters.

Abstract of approximately 1,500 characters is required (it will be further translated into Russian).

This goal of this site is to explore contemporary anthropology through
essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse
perspectives. There is no single way to define the field, hence
"anthropologies." By presenting various viewpoints and positions, this
site seeks to highlight not only what anthropology means to those who
practice it, but also how those meanings are relevant to wider
audiences.

ARTstor has launched
28,142 images of art and architecture in India from The American
Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) in the Digital Library. More than
50,000 images are now available documenting a range of visual traditions
from South Asian art, including stone, metal, and terracotta sculpture,
numismatics, painting, manuscripts and miniature paintings, as well as
Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, and Islamic architecture from all over India.
These images have been selected from the AIIS Photo Archive, which is
housed in the Center for Art and Archaeology in Gurgaon, Haryana, India.
Founded in 1961, the American Institute of Indian Studies
is a consortium of universities and colleges in the United States
through which scholars actively engage in teaching and research about
India. More than 6,000 scholars and creative artists have received
fellowship and research support from AIIS, resulting in thousands of
books and articles in disciplines ranging from anthropology to zoology.

After I wrote my Open Access Week post at my original blog
the other day, I realized I should really spend a little more time
recognizing the progress of the Ancient World Open Bibliographies
project over the past year.

The first post on this blog was just over a year ago, on October 1, 2010, describing the conceptualization of the project.
There was some discussion of software and scope early on, but within a
few months the blog settled down to the routine collection of existing
open-access bibliographic resources for the ancient world available
online. These are now collected both at a public Zotero group and a wiki.
At Zotero they can be found by subject tags; at the wiki they have a
more hierarchical classification structure that is essentially sui
generis.

Right now there are over 450 bibliographies included in the project.
Topic range from Celtic Europe to Tibet, but the vast majority of the
bibliographies cover the area around the Mediterranean during the later
Bronze and Iron Ages, with special emphasis on Greek and Roman.
Probably the most comprehensive coverage is for Greek Authors and Latin Authors, although even in these areas there are gaps – if you plan to teach a graduate seminar in Sophocles
this spring, for example, please do consider asking your students to
assemble an annotated scholarly bibliography as a class project! The
University of Cincinnati has some examples of how to use Zotero for this sort of thing.

My goals for the immediate future and the ongoing future are
multiple, and some are small (clean up the Zotero files, which have a
bunch of minor errors and infelicities) and some are big (do targeted
collection of existing bibliographies, and solicitation of new
bibliographies, so that more topics have full coverage and AWOB as a
whole is a well-rounded resource.) Today I’m adding a page for volunteers
at this blog, suggesting specific things – some quite small and
manageable – that you can do if you’d like to help AWOB continue to
grow. Have a look!

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

A collection of 127 fragments of texts written on papyrus arrived in
the library in 1926. Financial support for this acquisition was received
from Dr J. Enschedé, The Hague, a lawyer and alumnus of the University
of Groningen, and of the ‘Groninger Universiteitsfonds’. The papyri were
purchased through Prof. Wilhelm Schubart of Berlin University, who
bought them with a dealer in Egypt, and they were mounted by Dr h.c.
Hugo Ibscher, the famous papyrus conservator in Berlin. The initiative
to enrich the library with such a collection was taken by Antoon G. Roos
(1877-1953), professor of ancient history and Roman antiquities at Groningen (1916-1947), former curator (1904-1906) and librarian (1906-1917) of the university.

It is not known where exactly these fragments were found. In a few
cases, the texts inform us on their provenance: no. 5 is from
Oxyrhynchos, two others (nos. 2 and 9) are from the Arsinoites district,
text 2 from the ZPE 55 article (HendriksWorp 2) is from Hermopolites.
All date from the Roman or Byzantine era: the oldest one is from the
second century, the youngest from the sixth or seventh century...

The papyri presented in our digital collection are those described in
the original 1933 catalogue by A.G.Roos, by Hendriks, Parsons and Worp
in ZPE 41 (1981) and by Hendriks and Worp in ZPE 55 (1984). Each number
is displayed with photographs and pdf’s of the original publication and a
short document description. Detailed information is furthermore found
on the Trismegistos website, the interdisciplinary portal for papyrological and epigraphical resources. Papyri are provided with a TM (Trismegistos) number, a DDbDP (Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri) number, or a LDAB (Leuven Database of Ancient Books) number. Documentation of most of the Groningen papyri is also found in the HGV (Heidelberger
Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Aegyptens). In the
notes one finds later references to the papyri displayed, as mentioned
in the ''Berichtigingsliste der Griechischen Papyrusurkunden aus
Aegypten: Konkordanz und Supplement zu Band I-VII', and
'Berichtigungsliste der Griechischen Papyrusurkunden aus Aegypten Band
II Konkordanz und Supplement zu Band VIII-XI'.

"Having this Google Earth map debut on National Archaeology Day
emphasizes the fact that archaeological discoveries often times exist
right in our backyards," says Ben Thomas, AIA's Director of Programs.
"We welcome everyone of all ages to take a look at the map and then
explore a site that's close to them."

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Internet Archaeology is going totally ‘Open Access’ for duration of Open Access Week, 24-30 October 2011.

The
e-journal Internet Archaeology has been a hybrid Open Access journal
for over a year, and it is our wish to move fully towards a sustainable
Open Access (OA) model. I hope therefore that this event will both
demonstrate our serious efforts in this direction as well as give
potential authors (in whose hands the journal’s future really lies) the
opportunity to view the range of material IA can publish. I’d like to
encourage all authors to include OA fees in future research funding
applications wherever possible.

What we’ve done/are doing

·Following
negotiations, JISC Collections has purchased the full suite of Internet
Archaeology content on behalf of UK higher and further education
institutions, which means that their members have permanent access to 15 years of rich multimedia scholarly content.

·All reviews and editorials in Internet Archaeology have always been Open Access.

·We
have also had success more recently in attracting articles with OA
funding either via authors’ departmental research committees, government
agencies or University library OA funds.

·But
at current levels, this is still not enough to replace our existing
subscription income (which still provides the main means of covering our
costs i.e. one full-time member of staff and production overheads)
which would allow us to make the full transition to Open Access. However
the
proportion of uptake of the OA option will be continually monitored and
subscriptions to the journal will be reviewed annually in light of this
uptake while we make the transition.

What can you do?

oAre you applying for research funding? Where possible, include OA costs in your application. Just approach me at the earliest possible stage with your publication idea so that costs can be calculated.

oHave
you already finished your research/project and looking for a
publication outlet? Increasingly university departments and research
libraries have publication and/or OA funds. Investigate these options
and again let me know of your plans at the earliest opportunity.

About the journal:

The quarterly journal Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques is
published with the aim of informing the scientific community as well as
the general public about academic research on Asian regions and
cultures.

About the company:

The Swiss Asia Society is committed to the promotion of
scientific studies at Swiss universities focusing on the various regions
of Asia. It is an established forum for the discussion of issues
concerning the languages, the thought, the religions and myths, the
historical, social and geographic developments, as well as the
literatures and arts of historical and contemporary Asian cultures.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.